[00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:10.880] all right everybody i am very excited to bring jameson lopp to you all satillionaires here today [00:00:10.880 --> 00:00:19.120] he adopted bitcoin very early he takes us through an incredibly deep understanding of bitcoin [00:00:19.120 --> 00:00:25.840] how it works why it's valuable and where he thinks it should go next along with some practical tips [00:00:25.840 --> 00:00:33.120] for stacking your first sats securing them it's an incredible show and we have an absolutely brand [00:00:33.120 --> 00:00:38.640] new flavor of ithaca hummus to debut today on the show this is the collaboration between [00:00:38.640 --> 00:00:49.840] ithaca hummus and grasa olive oil so here's jameson welcome to sat chats the bitcoin podcast where we [00:00:49.840 --> 00:00:55.280] chat about sats sats are the smallest part of a bitcoin the same way pennies are the smallest [00:00:55.280 --> 00:01:00.880] part of a dollar with sat chats we're building the world's biggest bitcoin welcome center to serve [00:01:00.880 --> 00:01:09.600] as your gateway to generational wealth so if you are new to bitcoin we want to chat about sats with you [00:01:09.600 --> 00:01:17.440] hit satchats.com to grab your slot in the studio today i'm your host stewart bitcoin maxi who wears [00:01:17.440 --> 00:01:24.480] prescription sunglasses to protect you and your loved ones from my bitcoin laser eyes and i'm your co-host [00:01:24.480 --> 00:01:33.600] chris founder and ceo of ithaca hummus proud multi-coiner and bitcoin smash buyer so smash that like and [00:01:33.600 --> 00:01:41.120] subscribe the same way chris smash buys bitcoin we have a big show for you today three big things are [00:01:41.120 --> 00:01:46.320] going to be happening number one we're going to announce a brand new giveaway on the show [00:01:46.320 --> 00:01:54.240] we are trying to reach 999 plus one subscribers as soon as possible and when we do we will choose one [00:01:54.240 --> 00:02:01.440] from among you and drop a million sats on your face we are going to turn you into a satillionaire [00:02:02.000 --> 00:02:09.920] overnight because we are that focused on helping each and every satillionaire out there stack their [00:02:09.920 --> 00:02:17.200] first sats on the show so let's do make it happen and you might get a million sats number two we have a [00:02:17.200 --> 00:02:23.520] brand new flavor of hummus to try on today's show never before seen and we'll keep it in the shadows [00:02:23.520 --> 00:02:32.720] but really the biggest news is that we have jameson lop on the show today who is our very first bitcoin [00:02:32.720 --> 00:02:39.120] heavy on the show so we're going to be hearing jameson's bitcoin story today but before we do [00:02:39.120 --> 00:02:46.480] jameson maybe you can help our satillionaires uh get to know you a little bit sure so you know [00:02:46.480 --> 00:02:55.520] i am a native north carolinian myself my family history goes back to 1700s i believe on my father's [00:02:55.520 --> 00:03:03.280] side uh as we were talking about before the show third generation chapel hill alum and um i studied [00:03:03.280 --> 00:03:10.880] computer science at chapel hill and that was really one of the entry level things that got me hooked into [00:03:10.880 --> 00:03:19.600] bitcoin because i was working in durham north carolina doing software as a service web development stuff [00:03:19.600 --> 00:03:25.920] checking out the nerdy news sites on the daily and this bitcoin thing just kept coming up and of course [00:03:25.920 --> 00:03:32.880] i dismissed it for probably six to nine months assuming everybody was going to lose their money it would end in [00:03:32.880 --> 00:03:39.600] tears and kept coming up kept coming up eventually decided i should read the white paper and that's [00:03:39.600 --> 00:03:46.640] really what blew my mind from a computer science perspective because satoshi solved this problem [00:03:46.640 --> 00:03:51.200] this double spending problem which i had never thought of before i had never really concerned myself [00:03:51.200 --> 00:03:57.920] with the inner workings of money but when i saw how they solved the problem i was like you know this is [00:03:57.920 --> 00:04:03.680] pretty crazy because it seems like it works and yet it's the exact opposite of how a classically trained [00:04:03.680 --> 00:04:09.280] computer scientist would go about trying to solve the problem really inverted everything on its head [00:04:09.280 --> 00:04:16.880] because we are trained to solve problems as efficiently as possible to use the least amount of computational [00:04:16.880 --> 00:04:23.520] resources whether that's cpu bandwidth memory disk space whatever and you know satoshi said you know [00:04:23.520 --> 00:04:30.800] what we're going to spend a ton of cpu resources and we're going to spend a ton of bandwidth by flooding [00:04:30.800 --> 00:04:37.920] the entire world this global network of nodes with uh this redundant data and so you know from a computer [00:04:37.920 --> 00:04:44.880] science perspective i see bitcoin as the least performant database structure that i've ever come [00:04:44.880 --> 00:04:50.480] across in my entire career it's a horrible horrible database from performance perspective but you get [00:04:50.480 --> 00:04:56.240] some really interesting and unique properties as a result of some of these trade-offs and as we can see [00:04:56.240 --> 00:05:01.920] you know over the past 15 years this has turned into a trillion dollar industry just building on top of [00:05:01.920 --> 00:05:08.480] that really really solid foundation which is a terrible database so you're you're saying you're [00:05:08.480 --> 00:05:15.280] saying that the classically trained computer scientist is going to try to um have the you know most efficient [00:05:15.280 --> 00:05:23.760] footprint footprint possible but satoshi's idea was to flip it on its head and i guess are you saying [00:05:23.760 --> 00:05:30.080] that since since since everyone has like a copy of the the the blockchain on their node and they're all [00:05:30.080 --> 00:05:38.480] checking everybody's work like basically there's just like 20 000 redundant copies of blockchain on [00:05:38.480 --> 00:05:44.800] all these nodes and and through the inefficient use of computing resources you you get something very [00:05:44.800 --> 00:05:50.800] interesting yeah yeah both from that that redundancy uh which you know means that you know you have to [00:05:50.800 --> 00:05:56.960] have pretty low throughput to ensure that everybody can run a node and we can all sync uh and and validate [00:05:56.960 --> 00:06:05.040] the data on you know computers that are affordable to the average person um and also the proof of work [00:06:05.040 --> 00:06:13.120] mechanism it's the exact opposite of efficient and in fact the whole idea is to make it expensive to uh add [00:06:13.120 --> 00:06:22.000] blocks or change blocks on the blockchain so uh you know when you when you read the white paper [00:06:22.000 --> 00:06:31.520] um and you thought that this might this might work how did you feel when you read that yeah i mean it was [00:06:32.320 --> 00:06:37.920] it was exciting and to read about and so the next thing that i thought to myself was well now i need [00:06:37.920 --> 00:06:43.680] to actually use it i need to try it out i need to see for myself whether or not i think that it actually [00:06:43.680 --> 00:06:52.640] holds up to the promise of this nine page paper and that is where things started to get a little tricky [00:06:52.640 --> 00:06:59.600] because there were no exchanges in the united states that you could just hook a bank account up to i ended up [00:06:59.600 --> 00:07:08.640] having to go actually to my um north carolina state employees credit union bank and uh you know that [00:07:08.640 --> 00:07:13.760] that that i had as a result of working you know at the university of north carolina while i was a student [00:07:13.760 --> 00:07:20.640] and um i had to ask them hey can you help me send an international wire transfer and i had never sent a [00:07:20.640 --> 00:07:27.200] wire transfer in my life before and i ended up spending nearly an hour at the bank you know filling out [00:07:27.200 --> 00:07:34.800] paperwork talking to one of the managers of the bank who kept imploring that i needed to understand that [00:07:34.800 --> 00:07:40.560] once this money left my account there was no way to get it back and i needed to be really really sure [00:07:40.560 --> 00:07:45.920] that i wasn't getting scammed you know into some you know fake digital coin scheme because they didn't [00:07:45.920 --> 00:07:53.680] know what bitcoin was um so you know i i took i took a chance and um it took i think a few weeks [00:07:53.680 --> 00:08:01.600] to get that all sent and settled and and get my bitcoin from this little exchange called uh mt gox [00:08:01.600 --> 00:08:09.360] in japan and uh and that's where that's where things really started getting interesting so what year was it [00:08:09.360 --> 00:08:16.800] that you that you found bitcoin and read the white paper and and made that first wire transfer uh that [00:08:16.800 --> 00:08:26.160] was 2012. 2012 okay so pretty early there and your first bitcoin buy was from mount gox yeah uh you know [00:08:26.160 --> 00:08:31.120] it wasn't i think until a year or two later that coinbase uh really started opening up and uh [00:08:32.640 --> 00:08:39.280] onboarding a lot of americans um because you know i tell you sending sending those wire transfers [00:08:39.280 --> 00:08:44.800] is very annoying yeah and for for all the satillionaires out there who don't know mount gox ended up [00:08:44.800 --> 00:08:51.120] going belly up effectively right because they i'm not sure exactly what they did did they maybe they [00:08:51.120 --> 00:08:57.040] claimed to have more bitcoin than they did or they were being what happened there so it's a very long [00:08:57.040 --> 00:09:05.440] story um but as best we can tell it seems like gox got hacked multiple times and that it likely got [00:09:05.440 --> 00:09:13.520] hacked and was already technically insolvent even back in 2012 when i was using it um you know [00:09:13.520 --> 00:09:21.600] i think from looking at some of the on-chain analysis like it looked like it had been hemorrhaging coins [00:09:22.240 --> 00:09:28.400] essentially ever since inception like before mark carpelles even took over from uh jared i think it [00:09:28.400 --> 00:09:36.160] was jeb mccaleb um and so they were able to operate i think for a number of years while they were technically [00:09:36.160 --> 00:09:45.520] insolvent but then it was in the real run up to over a thousand dollars in 2014 where it just the problem [00:09:45.520 --> 00:09:51.040] spiraled out of control they couldn't keep up with it and too many people were requesting to take their [00:09:51.040 --> 00:09:57.120] coins off the exchange and eventually they just ran out of coins um and then that turned into a decade [00:09:57.120 --> 00:10:03.520] long bankruptcy process i think it was one of the longest ever bankruptcy processes in world history [00:10:03.520 --> 00:10:12.000] and also one of the most unique in the sense that it was the first company to ever magically go from [00:10:12.000 --> 00:10:18.480] insolvent to solvent like while it was going through this really long bankruptcy process simply because the [00:10:18.480 --> 00:10:23.680] value of the coins that they ended up finding later that they still had left just went up by so much [00:10:23.680 --> 00:10:30.560] so wild that is so wild did you take those into self-custody from mount gox or did you leave them [00:10:30.560 --> 00:10:36.560] on the exchange for a time so you know thankfully i understood what self-custody was i think a lot of [00:10:36.560 --> 00:10:43.600] of people didn't even know at the time and uh and so i was fortunate enough to avoid that particular [00:10:43.600 --> 00:10:50.560] disaster but you know if you've been in bitcoin long enough you're gonna get burned by something at some [00:10:50.560 --> 00:10:57.680] point you know there's just so many services have gone under over the years um i've i've lost way more [00:10:57.680 --> 00:11:03.120] bitcoin than i ever want to think about it's uh you know it's a very painful thing so uh one thing that i say is [00:11:03.120 --> 00:11:10.320] that one of the one of the hardest aspects about bitcoin is that it really is this game of attrition [00:11:10.320 --> 00:11:17.840] and basically it's this game of holding on to and keeping your coins safe from the myriad of things [00:11:17.840 --> 00:11:22.800] that can go wrong and i would say most of the things that can go wrong are usually related to when you [00:11:22.800 --> 00:11:30.160] leave your money with a trusted third party wow so you know the best term we have for guys like you [00:11:30.160 --> 00:11:37.360] uh are uh you know bare metal bitcoiners is what we say where there really wasn't this world of connecting [00:11:37.360 --> 00:11:47.680] in your cku bank account to you know coinbase i mean and you couldn't even necessarily get it easily [00:11:48.480 --> 00:11:55.760] you know where what what technology did did you all even have back in 2012 to to store your own bitcoin [00:11:55.760 --> 00:12:02.880] right yeah so acquiring it was hard um there were some really convoluted ways of acquiring it there was [00:12:02.880 --> 00:12:09.600] like the money gram red phone i think where you could go into certain like um certain drug stores that that [00:12:09.600 --> 00:12:17.840] had these uh ways of of sending money where you could essentially do like a peer-to-peer trade uh using [00:12:17.840 --> 00:12:26.960] the red phone um one thing that people did was they they would actually buy second life linden dollars [00:12:26.960 --> 00:12:32.880] and and there would be places where you could trade these other types of digital currency for bitcoin but [00:12:32.880 --> 00:12:36.640] it you then was like how do you get the linden dollars in the first place and so you'd have to [00:12:36.640 --> 00:12:44.800] go through all these really sketchy middlemen services and do multiple swaps but um as you [00:12:44.800 --> 00:12:53.040] mentioned we did not have many great self-custody options and um trezor didn't launch until 2014 that [00:12:53.040 --> 00:13:00.160] was the first you know dedicated hardware security device so really the the main option back then was you're [00:13:00.160 --> 00:13:04.400] actually going to run bitcoin core you know you're going to run the node you're going to use the wallet [00:13:04.400 --> 00:13:11.280] on the node and that's going to be how you secure your coins if you wanted to get really crazy um you [00:13:11.280 --> 00:13:17.520] you would try to use something like glacier protocol to do this all on an offline computer but uh i would [00:13:17.520 --> 00:13:24.240] say probably like 0.01 percent of people would try to do air-gapped computer stuff um if they even [00:13:24.240 --> 00:13:30.000] understood what that was it was just really really onerous and so the nice thing of what we've done over [00:13:30.000 --> 00:13:37.600] the past decade is continue to improve those best practices and make the best practices more user [00:13:37.600 --> 00:13:45.280] friendly so that people can follow them without having to be your computer science expert so by [00:13:45.280 --> 00:13:50.480] the way that's crazy so you effectively you needed to you you needed to almost operate your own full node [00:13:50.480 --> 00:13:58.320] in order to store your bitcoin in self-custody at that at that stage because the bitcoin core had that [00:13:58.320 --> 00:14:04.560] that kind of wallet built in yeah i mean it wasn't too difficult in the sense that you know you download [00:14:04.560 --> 00:14:10.080] the bitcoin software and run it uh though i think a lot of people would get thrown for a loop because [00:14:10.080 --> 00:14:16.240] you would have to spend hours or days you know downloading syncing uh the blockchain and um before [00:14:16.240 --> 00:14:22.720] you could really use the wallet itself but also this was a dangerous thing because you're keeping all of [00:14:22.720 --> 00:14:30.320] your keys most likely on your day-to-day desktop or laptop um the only nice thing was that you know back [00:14:30.320 --> 00:14:36.080] then there were far fewer hackers that were going around you know trying to break into your computer so that [00:14:36.080 --> 00:14:42.480] you know the threat landscape has greatly changed over the past 10 years as the entire space has gone [00:14:42.480 --> 00:14:50.560] more mainstream as there is a greater diversity and wealth of juicy targets for various types of [00:14:50.560 --> 00:14:59.680] criminals to try to go after uh in a variety of different ways so you know once you uh and i do i do want [00:14:59.680 --> 00:15:05.840] our satillionaires to get some advice from you on how to be secure as they're stacking their first sats [00:15:05.840 --> 00:15:14.880] but but before we do when you when you decided to start playing around with bitcoin you know what [00:15:14.880 --> 00:15:21.760] did you find did bitcoin hold up to the the promise of the white paper how did that how did that make [00:15:21.760 --> 00:15:28.800] you feel to start working with it in that way uh yeah i mean the first thing that i did was just [00:15:28.800 --> 00:15:34.800] you know try to find a few retail type sites where i could just use it to buy stuff and and it's you know [00:15:34.800 --> 00:15:41.600] once you then conduct some sort of transaction or you're receiving something else of value that's [00:15:41.600 --> 00:15:47.760] when you're like okay people people are actually agreeing that this thing has value because i can [00:15:47.760 --> 00:15:53.200] see that i can exchange it for other stuff so that was the first thing that really got me past the um [00:15:53.200 --> 00:15:59.840] skepticism that this is just internet funny money that uh is all a giant scam even if the system itself [00:15:59.840 --> 00:16:07.520] seems sound um pretty quickly after that though i started putting my computer science skills to work [00:16:07.520 --> 00:16:16.160] and i actually forked the bitcoin core repository added in about a thousand lines of code to collect metrics [00:16:16.720 --> 00:16:24.240] and the main reason for this was that i understood that you know the the great premise that the ethos that [00:16:24.240 --> 00:16:32.800] bitcoin rests upon is this idea of open source transparency you know we can all see what the system is doing [00:16:33.680 --> 00:16:44.720] and as a result i saw a gap where it seemed like um running a node did not have that same level of [00:16:44.720 --> 00:16:52.480] transparency and so this is where i created the statoshi project you can still go today to statoshi.info [00:16:52.480 --> 00:17:00.000] and you can see one of my bitcoin nodes and see all these pretty graphs uh charts metrics to see like [00:17:00.000 --> 00:17:06.880] what the actual internal operations are that that node is doing and i think that was a good starter [00:17:06.880 --> 00:17:12.640] project it got referenced by a number of developers over the years uh to make different arguments about [00:17:12.640 --> 00:17:21.040] improvements to bitcoin wow can you imagine understanding enough about bitcoin to crack open the code and [00:17:21.040 --> 00:17:29.520] and add some to it no that that is a mind-blowing thing right there you know what i mean yeah um [00:17:29.520 --> 00:17:37.280] but that didn't that that uh are you still able to use that today like i mean do people have to adopt [00:17:37.280 --> 00:17:44.000] that fork or it just allows you to collect info about that node for your for your research project yeah i [00:17:44.000 --> 00:17:49.840] mean this is uh this is only really you know if you want to understand what your node is doing so there [00:17:49.840 --> 00:17:55.040] are a few people that run that fork but i'm just keeping it updated uh because bitcoin core does [00:17:55.040 --> 00:18:01.920] two releases per year so twice per year i just pull down all of the code changes recompile my fork and [00:18:01.920 --> 00:18:06.960] put it back out there for people to use but you know for the average person you know you can just go [00:18:06.960 --> 00:18:14.800] to my website and that will give you a lot of the pretty charts that most other nodes if you were running [00:18:14.800 --> 00:18:22.720] it yourself would look pretty similar so after you got through your your early days what was it like for [00:18:22.720 --> 00:18:30.800] you to mature into you know deeper levels right we've had some guests on the show who stacked sats [00:18:30.800 --> 00:18:37.520] pretty early and as the exchange rate right i used to say the price of bitcoin i'm done with that that's [00:18:37.520 --> 00:18:44.800] silly yeah the exchange come on now bitcoin is money come on they're still trying to make us think in [00:18:44.800 --> 00:18:52.720] terms of dollars i'm not going to do it so as the exchange rate you know went upward what uh what did [00:18:52.720 --> 00:19:00.480] that mean for you how did it did it did bitcoin change your life well i mean the short answer is [00:19:00.480 --> 00:19:10.720] yes though um not so much you know because of wealth um we could go down this particular rabbit hole you [00:19:10.720 --> 00:19:17.360] know there's a number of different types of people who adopted bitcoin and in general the cohorts of the [00:19:17.360 --> 00:19:23.920] types of people who have adopted it over different cycles have generally changed but if we look at the [00:19:23.920 --> 00:19:31.760] people who adopted it around the time that i did uh which was right around the first having you know [00:19:31.760 --> 00:19:38.080] within the first four years you know possibly even within the first six or seven years those tended to be [00:19:38.640 --> 00:19:47.200] the cypherpunks the crypto anarchists um the the anarcho capitalists we were just trying to build a [00:19:47.200 --> 00:19:57.600] parallel system and sure there were people who had sort of gold bug-esque um long-term views of what [00:19:57.600 --> 00:20:03.600] could happen with the exchange rate but at least in my circles i felt like you know we were mainly looking [00:20:03.600 --> 00:20:11.200] at bitcoin as a currency not as a digital gold or long-term investment my investment thesis for bitcoin [00:20:11.200 --> 00:20:17.120] from the very beginning was really like a 30-year investment thesis and it was it was it was always [00:20:17.120 --> 00:20:23.920] this idea and i've repeated this mantra many times over the years that there's no guarantee that the [00:20:23.920 --> 00:20:31.760] exchange rate of bitcoin is going to go up but we do have basically a guarantee that the value of fiat is [00:20:31.760 --> 00:20:39.120] going to go down so i always just saw it as you know a multi-decade hedge against the constant devaluation [00:20:39.120 --> 00:20:47.520] of fiat i it is vastly exceeded my expectations in terms of exchange rate but that was never my primary [00:20:47.520 --> 00:20:56.640] motivation and you know as a result i kind of put myself in the camp of people who kind of accidentally [00:20:56.640 --> 00:21:03.840] lucked into um winning on the investment side because i didn't care about that i i was never [00:21:03.840 --> 00:21:09.280] really trading it for me it was buy hold for a really really long time and then maybe at some [00:21:09.280 --> 00:21:16.320] point in the future there's something else that you would want to exchange for it but um i'm really more [00:21:16.320 --> 00:21:22.000] focused on the freedom aspects of the technology and so you know if we start getting into some of the more [00:21:22.000 --> 00:21:28.480] nitty-gritty technical aspects in my long-term views i may actually sound to a lot of people like i'm very [00:21:28.480 --> 00:21:35.920] bearish because there's a lot of things that i am not satisfied with i see so much room for improvement [00:21:35.920 --> 00:21:43.280] for bitcoin from like a protocol level a technical level an adoption level that i actually think in some [00:21:43.280 --> 00:21:50.400] ways like the the value of bitcoin as a system has greatly outpaced where we're at in terms of being [00:21:50.400 --> 00:21:58.480] able to deliver the um the freedom the security the sovereignty that the protocol affords being able [00:21:58.480 --> 00:22:03.760] to deliver that to the masses and that's also why i've spent the past decade building self-custody [00:22:03.760 --> 00:22:08.960] wallets because i feel like there's still a big gap there that um you know the responsibility that is [00:22:08.960 --> 00:22:17.280] required that onus of you know taking this value into your own hands and not being able to just point [00:22:17.280 --> 00:22:22.960] at a third party and say oh it's your responsibility um you know that's still very off-putting for a lot [00:22:22.960 --> 00:22:29.360] of people and that's why we need to continue to make it easier for people to feel confident that they can be [00:22:29.360 --> 00:22:44.000] their own bank wow i do feel like there is a a lot of people who are bitcoiners and talk about bitcoin as [00:22:44.000 --> 00:22:51.600] effectively an immaculate conception it's perfect money um it works you know it it i guess to use a [00:22:51.600 --> 00:22:58.400] a different um mythology you know almost spraying hole from the head of zeus so to speak like athena [00:23:00.320 --> 00:23:09.520] but it did have bugs in its early days right i mean it is simply software and it can be hard for people [00:23:09.520 --> 00:23:17.360] to understand that a a piece of software or some code or a protocol can be money because we're just used to [00:23:17.360 --> 00:23:25.680] software getting updated all the time or crashing or you know coming in and out of popularity so for for [00:23:25.680 --> 00:23:34.720] someone with your level of um knowledge about bitcoin what are some ways that bitcoin could get better [00:23:34.720 --> 00:23:43.600] ooh uh well so this is the fun part because anytime you try to suggest a change to bitcoin there's [00:23:43.600 --> 00:23:53.040] probably going to be controversy and pushback but we're at a point right now where the the rate of [00:23:53.040 --> 00:23:59.520] upgrades to the protocol has been slowing um there there were you know 10 years ago we were making [00:23:59.520 --> 00:24:07.840] updates to the protocol almost on an annual basis and then what happened in 2016 2017 we had the fork wars [00:24:07.840 --> 00:24:17.280] the scaling wars and that really burned out a lot of deep thinkers in this space and so the rate of [00:24:17.280 --> 00:24:23.440] change and improvements after that has really dropped off to like maybe one thing every three years or so [00:24:23.440 --> 00:24:30.880] and so at this point i think it's been about three years since our last update with the taproot and um [00:24:30.880 --> 00:24:37.120] and so i'm worried about that particular trend and about how you know it's going to get harder and harder [00:24:37.120 --> 00:24:44.480] to make changes this is due to something called ossification which is basically a a law of physics for [00:24:44.480 --> 00:24:50.160] any network protocol as the size of the network grows it becomes harder and harder to coordinate change [00:24:50.880 --> 00:24:55.200] but there's a lot of things that i would love to see improved and we actually have a number of [00:24:55.200 --> 00:25:01.600] improvement proposals out there right now that are being debated these things like check template verify [00:25:01.600 --> 00:25:09.360] which would give a number of different new pieces of functionality uh something called covenants covenants [00:25:09.360 --> 00:25:16.960] are basically a way to put forward-looking restrictions on the flow of your money um if [00:25:18.880 --> 00:25:22.720] if that doesn't make much sense just think of it as the way the bitcoin works right now [00:25:22.720 --> 00:25:32.000] you have the ability to define the spending conditions for your bitcoin now for most people [00:25:32.000 --> 00:25:37.440] that just means you're going to create an address that has this locking script behind it that says [00:25:37.440 --> 00:25:44.000] i need one cryptographic signature that matches this public key and that's really all there is to it but [00:25:44.000 --> 00:25:49.200] bitcoin has a much more complex scripting language with more functionality than just checking signatures [00:25:49.200 --> 00:25:58.480] um and what it can only do today is let you create those spending conditions for where the bitcoin is [00:25:58.480 --> 00:26:05.680] right now with something like covenants you could say okay not only do we only let you move the money if [00:26:05.680 --> 00:26:12.000] you have you know this signature or these set of signatures or this lock time or whatever but you [00:26:12.000 --> 00:26:19.200] can say and the money can only go to these places and then these places have their own spending conditions [00:26:19.200 --> 00:26:27.280] and so that allows you to create much more interesting game theory for example you can create things called [00:26:27.280 --> 00:26:34.240] vaults where uh think of it as you can say okay my money can only go to this one address that is then [00:26:34.240 --> 00:26:38.080] time locked and has these other spending conditions and that actually gives you [00:26:40.240 --> 00:26:50.880] a type of escape hatch in the sense that you have time to react if those funds are moved without your [00:26:50.880 --> 00:26:56.400] permission you know you could say this gets locked up for a couple of weeks and during that period of [00:26:56.400 --> 00:27:04.000] time i can essentially move the funds myself uh to a different place if they got moved from the original [00:27:04.000 --> 00:27:09.920] vault without my permission so i find that interesting because that is kind of a missing aspect of [00:27:09.920 --> 00:27:15.120] security it's kind of like the other side of the coin to bitcoin security where right now we only [00:27:15.120 --> 00:27:23.040] have proactive security you basically have to create this really high wall of uh cyber security and [00:27:23.040 --> 00:27:30.160] even physical security around your keys because if they fall into the wrong hands or they get lost [00:27:30.160 --> 00:27:36.080] then it's game over it's catastrophic loss and no one can get you your money back but with something like [00:27:36.080 --> 00:27:43.680] vaults you would have reactive security it wouldn't just be a one layer of security type of mechanism [00:27:43.680 --> 00:27:49.120] but rather you would have a fallback and if something went wrong you could still recover from it [00:27:49.120 --> 00:27:55.840] and that's one of the primary things that we've been focused on for the past seven years at casa [00:27:56.800 --> 00:28:05.120] is giving people the ability to recover from mistakes from failures uh really from anything that can go [00:28:05.120 --> 00:28:12.000] wrong i think that that's one of the biggest missing pieces when it comes to self-custody custody in [00:28:12.000 --> 00:28:19.440] general is allowing people to be human allowing them to make mistakes allowing for failures to happen [00:28:20.080 --> 00:28:25.520] but architecting your setup in such a way that a failure isn't catastrophic i think that's been one [00:28:25.520 --> 00:28:30.800] of the biggest turnoffs to people from taking on responsibility for self-custody this entire time [00:28:33.280 --> 00:28:41.360] so it's almost like i could take my bitcoin and set up some of these rules and covenants to where [00:28:41.360 --> 00:28:52.400] if the lazarus group jumps onto my laptop and gets past all my uh you know protections as modest as they [00:28:52.400 --> 00:28:58.480] might be and is able to get into that desktop wallet i have for example and say all right well we're gonna shoot [00:28:58.480 --> 00:29:06.320] this um out of here uh so that we can grab it it would in fact only drop into a predetermined vault [00:29:06.320 --> 00:29:13.440] that would you know almost be like a panic room for my bitcoin and then i could then uh you know allow my [00:29:13.440 --> 00:29:22.400] brain to come back down to earth and figure out how i can save my own bitcoin instead of watching it just [00:29:23.040 --> 00:29:30.640] go off into the ether yep yeah and uh you know check tipple and verify and some of the other [00:29:30.640 --> 00:29:37.680] proposals that are out there can also improve existing technologies uh several of them have ways [00:29:37.680 --> 00:29:43.840] where they can actually uh greatly improve the flexibility and scalability of lightning network [00:29:43.840 --> 00:29:50.240] for example and lightning network has been running you know also for about seven years now [00:29:50.800 --> 00:29:56.480] in production and it's gotten a decent amount of adoption but it's you know sufficiently complex [00:29:56.480 --> 00:30:02.720] that i think uh you have to be really far down the bitcoin rabbit hole in order to start using it [00:30:02.720 --> 00:30:10.880] and there's a lot of potential for us to continue improving a lot of aspects around just you know managing [00:30:10.880 --> 00:30:19.920] channels and liquidity and keys and um being able to essentially share channels and liquidity with other [00:30:19.920 --> 00:30:24.960] people which would be you know more scalable potentially more private right it's almost [00:30:24.960 --> 00:30:30.400] like we're having to you know we kind of built our own money network and now we're building our own [00:30:30.400 --> 00:30:36.480] um it's not like a credit card network but it is like a like a high speed transactional type [00:30:36.480 --> 00:30:40.960] space that's just run by by ordinary people around the world [00:30:43.920 --> 00:30:52.560] so you mentioned um you know this idea of being interested in the freedom aspects of bitcoin and [00:30:52.560 --> 00:31:00.160] you know coming in with a class of anarcho-capitalists and cypherpunks um who want to build a parallel [00:31:00.160 --> 00:31:13.040] system so what do you see bitcoin doing over like centuries and do you think that we're still on track for that vision you have [00:31:13.040 --> 00:31:19.600] or do you think that you know all our all our guys in in wall street are kind of [00:31:19.600 --> 00:31:23.600] vacuuming up all the bitcoin and it's it's going in a different direction now [00:31:23.600 --> 00:31:33.600] yeah i mean that is the great battle that i've been fighting for the past 10 years is that i like to say [00:31:33.600 --> 00:31:39.440] at casa we are essentially fighting against human nature uh human nature [00:31:39.440 --> 00:31:49.040] generally is to choose convenience at the expense of almost all else and so i think that's one of the [00:31:49.040 --> 00:31:56.720] the most dangerous mindsets that is really baked into civilization just due to how civilization is [00:31:56.720 --> 00:32:05.920] architected you know over the millennia we have greatly improved the efficiency and the evolution [00:32:05.920 --> 00:32:14.160] of our economies through this concept of specialization of tasks you know that allows you to do one thing [00:32:14.160 --> 00:32:21.120] really really well and then as a result you don't have to and you spend a significant portion of your life [00:32:21.120 --> 00:32:27.680] dealing with menial things like uh raising livestock and and agricultural stuff and so [00:32:27.680 --> 00:32:33.520] on because you you outsource those tasks to someone who can do them much more efficiently and as a result [00:32:33.520 --> 00:32:39.680] you know everybody benefits uh because we're all uh much more efficient at the things that we do [00:32:39.680 --> 00:32:43.920] we do for work and then we use money to trade you know with other people who are more efficient at [00:32:43.920 --> 00:32:51.520] doing other things uh the downside to that is that it creates this systemic fragility within the entire [00:32:51.520 --> 00:32:58.560] system so for example if our supply chains broke down if the grocery store is closed we would be having [00:32:58.560 --> 00:33:07.280] a lot of problems within a week or so uh this entire uh industrial civilization would really grind to a [00:33:07.280 --> 00:33:12.080] halt because the result is we're just not self-sufficient anymore so that's one of the main [00:33:12.080 --> 00:33:20.880] trade-offs that we make and my point here is that it has become ingrained in us to outsource tasks that [00:33:20.880 --> 00:33:26.480] we're not good at or that we simply don't want to do for whatever reason and so it's very easy because [00:33:26.480 --> 00:33:32.000] of how people are already used to interacting with the rest of their financial accounts and life [00:33:32.560 --> 00:33:38.080] to just uh you know leave your bitcoin with a trusted third party and not think about or worry [00:33:38.080 --> 00:33:45.120] about you know the responsibility that comes with uh securing those coins so i think it's very easy for [00:33:45.120 --> 00:33:53.440] people to kind of hand wave away the counterparty risks when it comes to bitcoin even though we have [00:33:53.440 --> 00:34:01.040] a very lengthy 15-year history where counterparties are failing on a regular basis i mean look we had the [00:34:01.040 --> 00:34:08.320] biggest hack of the entire crypto ecosystem just a week or two ago uh something you know it was 1.5 [00:34:08.320 --> 00:34:16.400] billion dollars worth so it's not going to stop uh you know counterparties are going to continue to fail [00:34:16.400 --> 00:34:24.000] they're going to continue to um have issues of trust and you know they act as black boxes where you don't [00:34:24.000 --> 00:34:32.640] really know what's going on behind the scenes so um there's still like i said a lot of room for [00:34:32.640 --> 00:34:40.880] improvement here uh that's why we're trying to make self-custody easier um it is fighting against this [00:34:40.880 --> 00:34:48.160] systemic risk uh you know there's many different vectors of centralization and decentralization even just [00:34:48.160 --> 00:34:56.160] within the bitcoin ecosystem but one of the big ones is i think custody of coins the the more coins that [00:34:56.160 --> 00:35:04.240] are concentrated into fewer hands that just creates honey pots it creates systemic risk either from you [00:35:04.240 --> 00:35:11.760] know insider theft or failure or even um well obviously like hacks they make really juicy targets for various [00:35:11.760 --> 00:35:20.480] type of attackers or even 6102 type of attacks right nation state confiscation much more um easy for a [00:35:20.480 --> 00:35:26.240] nation state to do when they only have to kick down one door as opposed to kicking down millions of doors [00:35:26.240 --> 00:35:32.480] wow you know i'm familiar with the 51 attack and we've talked about 6102 on this show we hope our [00:35:32.480 --> 00:35:37.760] satillionaires out there have heard it enough times to know what it is but i love i love the idea of a [00:35:37.760 --> 00:35:45.280] 6102 attack that's like that that's a that's that a new way to kind of frame that up that's a nation [00:35:45.280 --> 00:35:53.280] state attack on your on your money there so terrified by that idea yeah man well i mean i think that a lot [00:35:53.280 --> 00:35:59.920] of people haven't really dug into what actually happened after the 6102 order um i actually remember [00:35:59.920 --> 00:36:07.360] talking to my own grandfather about it when i was a wee lad because they had gold and they didn't turn [00:36:07.360 --> 00:36:12.640] their gold into the government they hid it um and that was actually the common thing for people that [00:36:12.640 --> 00:36:18.800] were actually physically holding their own gold what really happened after the 6102 attacks was it was the [00:36:18.800 --> 00:36:25.920] major brokers and warehouses the trusted third parties that were holding gold on behalf of a lot of other [00:36:25.920 --> 00:36:32.960] people those were the ones where the gold actually got seized confiscated frozen uh so on and so forth [00:36:32.960 --> 00:36:42.560] so so uh jameson's grandfather wasn't repping a north carolina first in flight license plate with [00:36:42.560 --> 00:36:47.920] bitcoin on it behind him in his camera feed it was a north carolina first in flight license plate said [00:36:47.920 --> 00:36:53.440] not my gold you're not taking my goal dude you can't come come find my goal come try to find my goal [00:36:53.440 --> 00:37:04.640] um so uh what a what a what a great story too um for the satillionaire out there jameson this is the [00:37:04.640 --> 00:37:10.560] first show they've listened to maybe they're a young type uh with an interest in software engineering [00:37:11.200 --> 00:37:18.480] um what would be your recommendation for uh stacking their first sats taking some steps to secure [00:37:18.480 --> 00:37:30.720] themselves and you know maybe diving deeper into bitcoin uh i mean from a trading perspective i think you [00:37:30.720 --> 00:37:37.280] should just look at it as a really long-term savings account uh that's what worked out for me i think if [00:37:37.280 --> 00:37:42.080] you're an active trader if you're like looking at the exchange rate and then you're making decisions [00:37:42.080 --> 00:37:48.640] based on that it's a lot more likely that you're gonna get burned so you know dollar cost average you [00:37:48.640 --> 00:37:55.440] know on a weekly or monthly basis you can set up automatic recurring buys uh through a lot of the different [00:37:55.440 --> 00:38:02.000] services out there um i think river makes it pretty easy i'm pretty sure even coinbase does um [00:38:02.000 --> 00:38:12.800] and uh then the question is what level of security do you need for these funds i tend to break it down [00:38:12.800 --> 00:38:18.880] into a few different tiers there's there's pocket money if it's you know the amount of cash that you [00:38:18.880 --> 00:38:24.560] would walk around in your wallet then it's probably fine leaving it on the exchange or having it in a hot [00:38:24.560 --> 00:38:31.040] wallet because losing it is not going to be the end of the world once you get into the level of [00:38:31.040 --> 00:38:37.280] thousands of dollars worth that's when i think it starts to make sense to invest 50 to 100 dollars in [00:38:37.280 --> 00:38:45.520] one of the more popular hardware devices out there whether that's trezor ledger cold card passport bitbox [00:38:45.520 --> 00:38:52.000] really any of the popular ones they're all good none of them are perfect everything has trade-offs i don't [00:38:52.000 --> 00:38:58.160] uh specifically endorse one over the others just any of the popular ones are going to be great and [00:38:58.160 --> 00:39:06.080] that will protect you from like 95 of the problems just by getting your keys off the internet at that [00:39:06.080 --> 00:39:12.720] point your biggest problem generally becomes robustness against loss so you want to make sure that you have [00:39:12.720 --> 00:39:18.800] really good backups i have some very long articles with my thoughts about how to do [00:39:18.800 --> 00:39:23.600] backups but basically you want to have multiple redundant offline backups you know you don't want [00:39:23.600 --> 00:39:31.520] to keep them in the cloud or on your computer um that's where a lot of hacks happen once again and then [00:39:31.520 --> 00:39:37.280] beyond that it's like uh you know if you get to the point where you have a meaningful portion of your [00:39:37.280 --> 00:39:43.920] portfolio of your net worth in bitcoin that's when you want to take that final step and you want to say [00:39:43.920 --> 00:39:50.960] okay how do i get myself into a position where there's no single points of failure because even if you're [00:39:50.960 --> 00:39:56.480] using a hardware device if you're really if you're using any sort of single signature wallet which is [00:39:56.960 --> 00:40:03.360] generally the default in this space that is it's right there in the name single as a single point of failure [00:40:03.360 --> 00:40:09.040] there are things that can go wrong if those keys are lost or fall into the wrong hands and so [00:40:09.040 --> 00:40:15.120] the only way that you can really eliminate single points of failure is by having a lot of [00:40:15.120 --> 00:40:23.520] robustness and resilience and having multiple keys that are protecting your funds and that's what we really [00:40:23.520 --> 00:40:30.800] help people do at casa we help you get into a multi-sig setup where you're using multiple devices multiple [00:40:30.800 --> 00:40:38.880] different software hardware um keeping the keys in geographically dispersed locations so that various [00:40:38.880 --> 00:40:47.360] disasters or uh you know even home break-ins or your house burning down or whatever floods famine you know [00:40:47.360 --> 00:40:57.520] any sort of uh act that can cause uh destruction of material does not affect enough of your keys that [00:40:57.520 --> 00:41:05.040] you actually lose access to your funds and so you know this is a really complicated uh thing to think [00:41:05.040 --> 00:41:09.120] about because you basically have to think about every possible thing that could go wrong but we've been [00:41:09.120 --> 00:41:20.240] doing that now for seven years and uh think of it as you know if you put yourself into a casa setup where [00:41:20.240 --> 00:41:25.040] you're just following along with the instructions from the software what it's really doing is it's just [00:41:25.040 --> 00:41:30.960] guiding you through the best practices of what we've developed over the past decade from seeing [00:41:31.680 --> 00:41:38.560] a lot of catastrophes and learning from them so you know what what happens though if so we had 20 number [00:41:38.560 --> 00:41:47.120] 27 adam on the show he mined bitcoin early on 400 bitcoin on his laptop threw away the laptop by the [00:41:47.120 --> 00:41:52.240] time he realized he had thrown it away he's like whatever it was only worth 60 bucks right it was pocket [00:41:52.240 --> 00:42:01.760] money at that time but in today's terms it's you know 40 million so you know what happens for someone [00:42:01.760 --> 00:42:08.080] who realizes that today's pocket money is tomorrow's generational wealth do you need to just go ahead [00:42:08.080 --> 00:42:16.000] and get it onto a uh you know a hardware wallet or you know what how do you solve that conundrum um [00:42:16.000 --> 00:42:21.600] i think the easy way to think about it is you should take whatever the current value of your holdings [00:42:21.600 --> 00:42:30.160] are and 10x them because you know the exchange rate is volatile and over the period of a few months it [00:42:30.160 --> 00:42:37.120] could do a 10x and you don't want to be caught unawares you know you don't want to have um a hundred [00:42:37.120 --> 00:42:42.240] dollar level of security on something that becomes worth thousands of dollars you don't want to have [00:42:42.240 --> 00:42:47.360] a thousand dollar level on something that could be worth a hundred thousand so on and so forth um [00:42:49.040 --> 00:42:53.760] but it's it's also just one of those things that happens naturally especially if you're in the space [00:42:53.760 --> 00:42:59.520] long enough you you probably have multiple wallets laying around with dust in them and you forget about [00:42:59.520 --> 00:43:04.000] some of them and then maybe someday you come back to them and you find there's you know thousands of [00:43:04.000 --> 00:43:15.840] dollars in there um but i think you just need to um stay plugged in and maintain your setups this is [00:43:15.840 --> 00:43:21.920] this is not something that i recommend uh setting up and walking away from you i think a lot of people [00:43:21.920 --> 00:43:27.600] have this idea of you know i buy my gold i bury it in the ground and i come back in 10 years but like i [00:43:27.600 --> 00:43:34.000] said this is software and technology and it's it's a constantly changing environment so you want to [00:43:34.000 --> 00:43:41.040] have at least some high level of of ongoing like keeping up with what's going on because there are [00:43:41.040 --> 00:43:46.640] things that could happen so we're gonna we're gonna uh we're gonna do a couple things here jameson [00:43:47.280 --> 00:43:54.800] number one uh we ask all of our guests if they would come back on the show in nine months [00:43:54.800 --> 00:44:00.800] to give us an update on their bitcoin baby would you be willing to do that for us no problem we love [00:44:00.800 --> 00:44:07.600] that number two we want people to know where they can find you your you know your your website which [00:44:07.600 --> 00:44:14.640] is an absolute i would say goldmine but it's more like a bitcoin mine of information your company casa [00:44:14.640 --> 00:44:19.920] where can people find uh you know you to engage with you where can they find your your company to [00:44:19.920 --> 00:44:27.440] engage with that yeah i'm on x my handle is just my last name l-o-p-p um you can check out my [00:44:27.440 --> 00:44:36.080] educational bitcoin resources at bitcoin.page uh you can check out casa at c-a-s-a dot i-o [00:44:36.080 --> 00:44:42.720] and isn't there like a lop.net or yeah so uh bitcoin.page goes to lop.net i just figure [00:44:42.720 --> 00:44:48.800] it's easier for people to remember okay all right so we're gonna make you an offer here but before we [00:44:48.800 --> 00:44:55.120] do we're gonna taste some hummus and i'm gonna let chris introduce this uh because it seems like it's [00:44:55.120 --> 00:45:02.000] uh this is a kind of like a special debut kind of kind of it's actually huge okay i'm underselling [00:45:02.000 --> 00:45:10.480] it this is a brand new hummus by ithaca it is a partnership with graza olive oil so it's that big [00:45:10.480 --> 00:45:18.560] green bottle olive oil sea salt and everything else that you know and love from from ithaca so we're gonna [00:45:18.560 --> 00:45:25.600] have a quick taste of this this has never appeared on the show before so let's give this a try ready yep [00:45:30.320 --> 00:45:34.960] wow olive oil sea salt [00:45:34.960 --> 00:45:39.920] so good wow [00:45:39.920 --> 00:45:42.480] it's like [00:45:42.480 --> 00:45:52.880] hummus flavor nice fresh olive oil flavor and then it's like some like salt flavor at the end yep yep oh my [00:45:52.880 --> 00:45:56.720] gosh can't beat that talk about holding down the center of a charcuterie board [00:45:56.720 --> 00:46:04.320] that is delicious so let's make jameson his offer all right jameson so as a small token of our [00:46:04.320 --> 00:46:11.680] appreciation here at sat chats we believe in exchanging value for value so um we're gonna make you an offer [00:46:11.680 --> 00:46:21.440] and you'll have your choice between 50 usd which we've got framed here encased in glass i'll give [00:46:21.440 --> 00:46:28.480] that to stewart to hold now that he can hold it yep um or 50 worth of sats which if i go to the clark [00:46:28.480 --> 00:46:36.640] moody dashboard behind me oh my gosh uh the price of one bitcoin right now is 79 540 dollars [00:46:36.640 --> 00:46:44.400] dipping below 80k okay great time to buy um if you if you're like that um or that translates into [00:46:44.400 --> 00:46:55.440] 1 257 sats per dollar one two five seven times 50. holy is the highest sats offering we have ever [00:46:55.440 --> 00:47:04.880] made on this show 62 850 sats or 50 usd what's it going to be jameson is there any numismatic value [00:47:04.880 --> 00:47:14.160] to that 50 bill this there is none we're gonna you know we're gonna we're gonna pull this musty [00:47:14.160 --> 00:47:25.200] crusty bill out and and send it to you if that's what you want or 62 850 sats sats it is yes sir [00:47:25.200 --> 00:47:35.760] let's go my guy jameson with the sats so you bring our score to 30 guests who chose sats versus three [00:47:35.760 --> 00:47:43.920] who chose the cash so uh thank you so much for coming on the show jameson for all our satillionaires out [00:47:43.920 --> 00:47:52.080] there it's bitcoin.page for an absolute host of resources along with casa.io if you're in that [00:47:52.080 --> 00:48:01.760] third tier of needing um to secure your bitcoin avoid that single point of failure because today's [00:48:01.760 --> 00:48:10.560] pocket cash is tomorrow's generational wealth let's go yeah holy smoke so um give us your value for our [00:48:10.560 --> 00:48:18.960] value like and subscribe if you enjoyed our chat about sats today with jameson five stars on spotify [00:48:18.960 --> 00:48:25.440] i'm sure there's numismatic value somewhere on that platform as well you gotta search for it though [00:48:25.440 --> 00:48:33.280] help us get to 999 plus one subscribers as soon as humanly possible we will choose one from among you [00:48:33.840 --> 00:48:41.280] and drop a million sats right on top of you make you an instant satillionaire thanks so much for [00:48:41.280 --> 00:48:49.360] listening today and remember sat chats is for educational purposes only and should not be [00:48:49.360 --> 00:49:04.720] construed as financial advice also our guests views are their own